Anchor Park
A hydroglyph public park with specially-designed biotopes and blue-green ecosystems for humans, plants, and wildlife.
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Alexandra Vindfeld Hansen
R&D Director, Partner, Landscape Architect MDL
Location
Malmö, Sweden
Size
30,000 m2
Year
1999 — 2001
Client
City of Malmö
Role
Landscape architect
Anchor Park (Ankarparken) in Malmø, Sweden is one of the world’s first projects to combine specially designed nature biotopes on land and in water to create a public park with unison blue-green ecosystem for humans, plants, and wildlife.
The result is a groundbreaking 30,000 m2 central community park for the BO01 harbor neighborhood, which provides everyday recreational activities for the residents, natural climate adaptation, and lush, biodiverse nature experiences for all.
The Anchor Park is the result of SLA’s award-winning entry into an international design competition. The 3-hectares park is located on a former industrial harbor plant, which has been transformed into the new BO01 city district. The park runs through the district like a band of water and nature fields with natural biotope formations distributed randomly in the park on both land and water.
The Anchor Park explores the full scope of tactility of materials, which are imbued by this specific local context: Concrete, tarmac, grass, wood, and iron brought together in a contemporary reference to the past. The biotopes are well-defined Swedish landscape types conceived as ‘pockets of time’ where one can dwell and become absorbed by the play of nature.
The design of the park does not depend on any formal built principles. Rather, it is solely determined by matter and composition as an injection of nature to complement and counterbalance the predictable and rational order of the surrounding new town.
The focus on vegetation and on the interplay between climate and nature is deliberately put forward with the intention of dissolving the city’s man-made perfection. These perpetual and ever-changing conditions are put on a formula through a series of independent, yet correlated plays with each their modality and pulse.
The Anchor Park is a ‘hydroglyph park’ – an aquatic park exploring the effects that water will have on the transformation of matter. The concept is to have a spatial composition that never seems static. Only time will determine how it looks.
The natural diversity and intricate detailing of the park call for the attention of the wanderer through a fluent organization of spaces, surfaces, and textures, which must be experienced in motion. With no fixed viewpoints, the park operates without a visual hierarchy: The scenery is perpetually changing, flowing, and unfolding into a surprising and unforeseen interaction of materials, nature, and humans.
